The original single-shot multibox detector (SSD) algorithm has good detection accuracy and speed for regular object recognition. However, the SSD is not suitable for detecting small objects for two reasons: 1) the relationships among different feature layers with various scales are not considered, 2) the predicted results are solely determined by several independent feature layers. To enhance its detection capability for small objects, this study proposes an improved SSD-based algorithm called proportional channels' fusion SSD (PCF-SSD). Three enhancements are provided by this novel PCF-SSD algorithm. First, a fusion feature pyramid model is proposed by concatenating channels of certain key feature layers in a given proportion for object detection. Second, the default box sizes are adjusted properly for small object detection. Third, an improved loss function is suggested to train the above-proposed fusion model, which can further improve object detection performance. A series of experiments are conducted on the public database Pascal VOC to validate the PCF-SSD. On comparing with the original SSD algorithm, our algorithm improves the mean average precision and detection accuracy for small objects by 3.3% and 3.9%, respectively, with a detection speed of 40FPS. Furthermore, the proposed PCF-SSD can achieve a better balance of detection accuracy and efficiency than the original SSD algorithm, as demonstrated by a series of experimental results.

The finger-vein-based deep neural network authentication system has been applied widely in real scenarios, such as countries' banking and entrance guard systems. However, to ensure performance, the deep neural network should train many parameters, which needs lots of time and computing resources. This paper proposes a method that introduces artificial features with prior knowledge into the convolution layer. First, it designs a multi-direction pattern base on the traditional local binary pattern, which extracts general spatial information and also reduces the spatial dimension. Then, establishes a sample effective deep convolutional neural network via combination with convolution, with the ability to extract deeper finger vein features. Finally, trains the model with a composite loss function to increase the inter-class distance and reduce the intra-class distance. Experiments show that the proposed methods achieve a good performance of higher stability and accuracy of finger vein recognition.

Recently, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods have significantly improved the performance of target-driven indoor navigation tasks. However, the rich semantic information of environments is still not fully exploited in previous approaches. In addition, existing methods usually tend to overfit on training scenes or objects in target-driven navigation tasks, making it hard to generalize to unseen environments. Human beings can easily adapt to new scenes as they can recognize the objects they see and reason the possible locations of target objects using their experience. Inspired by this, we propose a DRL-based target-driven navigation model, termed MVC-PK, using Multi-View Context information and Prior semantic Knowledge. It relies only on the semantic label of target objects and allows the robot to find the target without using any geometry map. To perceive the semantic contextual information in the environment, object detectors are leveraged to detect the objects present in the multi-view observations. To enable the semantic reasoning ability of indoor mobile robots, a Graph Convolutional Network is also employed to incorporate prior knowledge. The proposed MVC-PK model is evaluated in the AI2-THOR simulation environment. The results show that MVC-PK (1) significantly improves the cross-scene and cross-target generalization ability, and (2) achieves state-of-the-art performance with 15.2% and 11.0% increase in Success Rate (SR) and Success weighted by Path Length (SPL), respectively.

With the widespread use of indoor positioning technology, the need for high-precision positioning services is rising; nevertheless, there are several challenges, such as the difficulty of simulating the distribution of interior location data and the enormous inaccuracy of probability computation. As a result, this paper proposes three different neural network model comparisons for indoor location based on WiFi fingerprint - indoor location algorithm based on improved back propagation neural network model, RSSI indoor location algorithm based on neural network angle change, and RSSI indoor location algorithm based on depth neural network angle change - to raise accurately predict indoor location coordinates. Changing the action range of the activation function in the standard back-propagation neural network model achieves the goal of accurately predicting location coordinates. The revised back-propagation neural network model has strong stability and enhances indoor positioning accuracy based on experimental comparisons of loss rate (loss), accuracy rate (acc), and cumulative distribution function (CDF).

In a power network, it is important to detect a cyber attack. In this paper, we propose a method for detecting false data injection (FDI) attacks in distributed state estimation. An FDI attack is well known as one of the typical cyber attacks in a power network. As a method of FDI attack detection, we consider calculating the residual (i.e., the difference between the observed and estimated values). In the proposed detection method, the tentative residual (estimated error) in ADMM (Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers), which is one of the powerful methods in distributed optimization, is applied. First, the effect of an FDI attack is analyzed. Next, based on the analysis result, a detection parameter is introduced based on the residual. A detection method using this parameter is then proposed. Finally, the proposed method is demonstrated through a numerical example on the IEEE 14-bus system.

Multi-band transmission technologies promise to cost-effectively expand the capacity of optical networks by exploiting low-loss spectrum windows beyond the conventional band used in already-deployed fibers. While such technologies offer a high potential for capacity upgrades, available capacity is seriously restricted not only by the wavelength-continuity constraint but also by the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) constraint. In fact, exploiting more bands can cause higher SNR imbalance over multiple bands, which is mainly due to stimulated Raman scattering. To relax these constraints, we propose wavelength-selective band switching-enabled networks (BSNs), where each wavelength channel can be freely switched to any band and in any direction at any optical node on the route. We also present two typical optical node configurations utilizing all-optical wavelength converters, which can realize the switching proposal. Moreover, numerical analyses clarify that our BSN can reduce the fiber resource requirements by more than 20% compared to a conventional multi-band network under realistic conditions. We also discuss the impact of physical-layer performance of band switching operations on available benefits to investigate the feasibility of BSNs. In addition, we report on a proof-of-concept demonstration of a BSN with a prototype node, where C+L-band wavelength-division-multiplexed 112-Gb/s dual-polarization quadrature phase-shift keying signals are successfully transmitted while the bands of individual channels are switched node-by-node for up to 4 cascaded nodes.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have recently demonstrated outstanding performance in image retrieval tasks. Local convolutional features extracted by CNNs, in particular, show exceptional capability in discrimination. Recent research in this field has concentrated on pooling methods that incorporate local features into global features and assess the global similarity of two images. However, the pooling methods sacrifice the image's local region information and spatial relationships, which are precisely known as the keys to the robustness against occlusion and viewpoint changes. In this paper, instead of pooling methods, we propose an alternative method based on local similarity, determined by directly using local convolutional features. Specifically, we first define three forms of local similarity tensors (LSTs), which take into account information about local regions as well as spatial relationships between them. We then construct a similarity CNN model (SCNN) based on LSTs to assess the similarity between the query and gallery images. The ideal configuration of our method is sought through thorough experiments from three perspectives: local region size, local region content, and spatial relationships between local regions. The experimental results on a modified open dataset (where query images are limited to occluded ones) confirm that the proposed method outperforms the pooling methods because of robustness enhancement. Furthermore, testing on three public retrieval datasets shows that combining LSTs with conventional pooling methods achieves the best results.

The acquisition of distant sound has always been a hot research topic. Since sound is caused by vibration, one of the best methods for measuring distant sound is to use a laser Doppler vibrometer (LDV). This laser has high directivity, that enables it to acquire sound from far away, which is of great practical use for disaster relief and other situations. However, due to the vibration characteristics of the irradiated object itself and the reflectivity of its surface (or other reasons), the acquired sound is often lacking frequency components in certain frequency bands and is mixed with obvious noise. Therefore, when using LDV to acquire distant speech, if we want to recognize the actual content of the speech, it is necessary to enhance the acquired speech signal in some way. Conventional speech enhancement methods are not generally applicable due to the various types of degradation in observed speech. Moreover, while several speech enhancement methods for LDV have been proposed, they are only effective when the irradiated object is known. In this paper, we present a speech enhancement method for LDV that can deal with unknown irradiated objects. The proposed method is composed of noise reduction, pitch detection, power spectrum envelope estimation, power spectrum reconstruction, and phase estimation. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for enhancing the acquired speech with unknown irradiated objects.

We propose GConvLoc, a WiFi fingerprinting-based indoor localization method utilizing graph convolutional networks. Using the graph structure, we can consider the fingerprint data of the reference points and their location labels in addition to the fingerprint data of the test point at inference time. Experimental results show that GConvLoc outperforms baseline methods that do not utilize graphs.

To accelerate research on Beyond 5G (B5G) technologies in Japan, we propose an algorithm that designs mesh-type metropolitan area network (MAN) models based on a priori Japanese regional railway information, because ground-truth communication network information is unavailable. Instead, we use the information of regional railways, which is expected to express the necessary geometric structure of our metropolitan cities while remaining strongly correlated with their population densities and demographic variations. We provide an additional compression algorithm for use in reducing a small-scale network model from the original MAN model designed using the proposed algorithm. Two Tokyo MAN models are created, and we provide day and night variants for each while highlighting the number of passengers alighting/boarding at each station and the respective population densities. The validity of the proposed algorithm is verified through comparisons with the Japan Photonic Network model and another model designed using the communication network information, which is not ground-truth. Comparison results show that our proposed algorithm is effective for designing MAN models and that our result provides a valid Tokyo MAN model.

A drone swarm is a robotic architecture having multiple drones cooperate to accomplish a mission. Nowadays, heterogeneous drone swarms, in which a small number of gateway drones (GWs) act as protocol translators to enable the mixing of multiple swarms that use independent wireless protocols, have attracted much attention from many researchers. Our previous work proposed Path Optimizer — a method to minimize the number of end-to-end path-hops in a remote video monitoring system using heterogeneous drone swarms by autonomously relocating GWs to create a shortcut in the network for each communication request. However, Path Optimizer has limitations in improving communication quality when more video sessions than the number of GWs are requested simultaneously. Path Coordinator, which we propose in this paper, achieves a uniform reduction in end-to-end hops and maximizes the allowable hop satisfaction rate regardless of the number of sessions by introducing the cooperative and synchronous relocation of all GWs. Path Coordinator consists of two phases: first, physical optimization is performed by geographically relocating all GWs (relocation phase), and then logical optimization is achieved by modifying the relaying GWs of each video flow (rerouting phase). Computer simulations reveal that Path Coordinator adapts to various environments and performs as well as we expected. Furthermore, its performance is comparable to the upper limits possible with brute-force search.

Influential user detection is critical in supporting the human facilitator-based facilitation in the online forum. Traditional approaches to detect influential users in the online forum focus on the statistical activity information such as the number of posts. However, statistical activity information cannot fully reflect the influence that users bring to the online forum. In this paper, we propose to detect the influencers from the influence propagation perspective and focus on the influential maximization (IM) problem which aims at choosing a set of users that maximize the influence propagation from the entire social network. An online forum influence propagation network (OFIPN) is proposed to model the influence from an individual user perspective and influence propagation between users, and a heuristic algorithm that is proposed to find influential users in OFIPN. Experiments are conducted by simulations with a real-world social network. Our empirical results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Automatic modulation recognition (AMR) plays a critical role in modern communication systems. Owing to the recent advancements of deep learning (DL) techniques, the application of DL has been widely studied in AMR, and a large number of DL-AMR algorithms with high recognition rates have been developed. Most DL-AMR algorithm models have high recognition accuracy but have numerous parameters and are huge, complex models, which make them hard to deploy on resource-constrained platforms, such as satellite platforms. Some lightweight and low-complexity DL-AMR algorithm models also struggle to meet the accuracy requirements. Based on this, this paper proposes a lightweight and high-recognition-rate DL-AMR algorithm model called Lightweight Densely Connected Convolutional Network (DenseNet) Long Short-Term Memory network (LDLSTM). The model cascade of DenseNet and LSTM can achieve the same recognition accuracy as other advanced DL-AMR algorithms, but the parameter volume is only 1/12 that of these algorithms. Thus, it is advantageous to deploy LDLSTM in resource-constrained systems.

In real world applications of multiclass classification models, misclassification in an important class (e.g., stop sign) can be significantly more harmful than in other classes (e.g., no parking). Thus, it is crucial to improve the recall of an important class while maintaining overall accuracy. For this problem, we found that improving the separation of important classes relative to other classes in the feature space is effective. Existing methods that give a class-sensitive penalty for cross-entropy loss do not improve the separation. Moreover, the methods designed to improve separations between all classes are unsuitable for our purpose because they do not consider the important classes. To achieve the separation, we propose a loss function that explicitly gives loss for the feature space, called class-sensitive additive angular margin (CAMRI) loss. CAMRI loss is expected to reduce the variance of an important class due to the addition of a penalty to the angle between the important class features and the corresponding weight vectors in the feature space. In addition, concentrating the penalty on only the important class hardly sacrifices separating the other classes. Experiments on CIFAR-10, GTSRB, and AwA2 showed that CAMRI loss could improve the recall of a specific class without sacrificing accuracy. In particular, compared with GTSRB's second-worst class recall when trained with cross-entropy loss, CAMRI loss improved recall by 9%.

Crowdsensing-based spectrum detection (CSD) is promising to enable full-coverage radio resource availability for the increasingly connected machines in the Internet of Things (IoT) networks. The current CSD scheme consumes a lot of energy and network resources for local sensing, processing, and distributed data reporting for each crowdsensing device. Furthermore, when the amount of reported data is large, the data fusion implemented at the requestor can easily cause high latency. For improving efficiencies in both energy and network resources, this paper proposes a green CSD (GCSD) paradigm. The ambient backscatter (AmB) is used to enable a battery-free mode of operation in which the received spectrum data is reported directly through backscattering without local processing. The energy for backscattering can be provided by ambient radio frequency (RF) sources. Then, relying on air computation (AirComp), the data fusion can be implemented during the backscattering process and over the air by utilizing the summation property of wireless channel. This paper illustrates the model and the implementation process of the GCSD paradigm. Closed-form expressions of detection metrics are derived for the proposed GCSD. Simulation results verify the correctness of the theoretical derivation and demonstrate the green properties of the GCSD paradigm.

Due to the limitations of cloud computing on latency, bandwidth and data confidentiality, edge computing has emerged as a novel location-aware paradigm to provide them with more processing capacity to improve the computing performance and quality of service (QoS) in several typical domains of human activity in smart society, such as social networks, medical diagnosis, telecommunications, recommendation systems, internal threat detection, transports, Internet of Things (IoT), etc. These application domains often handle a vast collection of entities with various relationships, which can be naturally represented by the graph data structure. Graph processing is a powerful tool to model and optimize complex problems in which the graph-based data is involved. In view of the relatively insufficient resource provisioning of the portable terminals, in this paper, for the first time to our knowledge, we propose an interactive and reductive graph processing library (GPL) for edge computing in smart society at low overhead. Experimental evaluation is conducted to indicate that the proposed GPL is more user-friendly and highly competitive compared with other established systems, such as igraph, NetworKit and NetworkX, based on different graph datasets over a variety of popular algorithms.

In this article, a GUI system is proposed to support clinical cardiology examinations. The proposed system estimates “pulmonary artery wedge pressure” based on patients' chest radiographs using an explainable regression-based convolutional neural network. The GUI system was validated by performing an effectiveness survey with 23 cardiology physicians with medical licenses. The results indicated that many physicians considered the GUI system to be effective.

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), short packet transmissions will dominate the future wireless communication. However, traditional coherent demodulation and channel estimation schemes require large pilot overhead, which may be highly inefficient for short packets in multipath fading scenarios. This paper proposes a novel pilot-free short packet structure based on the association of modulation on conjugate-reciprocal zeros (MOCZ) and tail-biting convolutional codes (TBCC), where a noncoherent demodulation and decoding scheme is designed without the channel state information (CSI) at the transceivers. We provide a construction method of constellation sets and demodulation rule for M-ary MOCZ. By deriving low complexity log-likelihood ratios (LLR) for M-ary MOCZ, we offer a reasonable balance between energy and bandwidth efficiency for joint coding and modulation scheme. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme can attain significant performance and throughput gains compared to the pilot-based coherent modulation scheme over multipath fading channels.

We characterized prion disease by comparing brain functional connectivity network (BFCN), which were constructed by 16-ch scalp-recorded electroencephalograms (EEGs). The connectivity between each pair of nodes (electrodes) were computed by synchronization likelihood (SL). The BFCN was applied to graph theory to discriminate prion disease patients from healthy elderlies and dementia groups.

As a key technology of 5G, NFV has attracted much attention. In addition, monitoring plays an important role, and can be widely used for virtual network function placement and resource optimisation. The existing monitoring methods focus on the monitoring load without considering they own resources needed. This raises a unique challenge: jointly optimising the NFV monitoring systems and minimising their monitoring load at runtime. The objective is to enhance the gain in real-time monitoring metrics at minimum monitoring costs. In this context, we propose a novel NFV monitoring solution, namely, iMon (Monitoring by inferring), that jointly optimises the monitoring process and reduces resource consumption. We formalise the monitoring process into a multitarget regression problem and propose three regression models. These models are implemented by a deep neural network, and an experimental platform is built to prove their availability and effectiveness. Finally, experiments also show that monitoring resource requirements are reduced, and the monitoring load is just 0.6% of that of the monitoring tool cAdvisor on our dataset.